Charlie Cried on the Highway and So Did I

A Freshman, Some Letters, and a Whole Lot of Feelings

Here’s the setup, and it’s deceptively simple. Charlie is starting high school. He’s smart, he’s weird in the specific way that gets you eaten alive by other teenagers, and he’s writing letters to an unnamed “friend” about his life because, as far as I can tell, nobody actually talks to him yet. Through the letters we watch him get folded into a group of seniors, mainly Patrick and his stepsister Sam, who are the kind of magnetic, slightly damaged older kids every awkward freshman prays will notice them exist.

What follows is a school year of mix tapes, homemade brownies, a rescreening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, a Secret Santa gift that made me tear up before I even knew why it mattered, and the low hum of something wrong underneath Charlie that the book takes its sweet time revealing. Chbosky plays a long game with what actually happened to Charlie, and if you’re paying attention there are breadcrumbs from page one. I did not catch them the first time. I caught every single one the second time and felt a little sick about it.

Why It Works (And Where It Doesn’t)

Look, the voice is the whole book. Charlie writes like someone who has never once been taught to hide his feelings, which makes him either the most honest narrator in YA or almost unbearably naive, and honestly it’s both at once. There’s a moment where he watches Sam cry over something small and just states, plainly, that he wants to kiss her, and it’s such an unguarded thought that it stopped me cold. Nobody writes like that. That’s the point.

The needle drops and the mix tape culture of it all still gets me. The tunnel scene, where Sam stands up in the truck bed with the wind in her hair while a song plays that Charlie doesn’t recognize (people love to argue over whether it’s Bowie), is one of those moments that shouldn’t work on the page and completely does. I’ve read it probably a dozen times and it still gives me that specific ache of watching someone else be young and free while you’re the one taking notes.

Here’s the thing though. I have to be honest about the parts that don’t hold up. The “wallflower” affect, the constant crying, the almost saintly passivity of Charlie for two-thirds of the book, reads a little thin to me as an adult in a way it never did at fifteen. He’s less a fully drawn character sometimes and more a vessel for Chbosky to funnel every Big Teenage Issue through: drugs, abuse, sexuality, mental illness, first love, all of it happening to one kid in one school year strains credulity if you squint. And the ending, when the truth about Charlie’s aunt finally lands, works emotionally but it’s also doing a lot of narrative heavy lifting all at once, dropped in the last twenty pages like Chbosky ran out of book before he ran out of things he needed to explain. I’m genuinely torn on whether that’s devastating plotting or a cheat. Maybe both.

My tangent: this is one of those books I almost don’t trust my own love for, because I read it exactly when I needed a Charlie, a Patrick, a Sam, and I wonder how much of the five stars in my memory is the book and how much is me at seventeen sitting alone in a cafeteria. That’s not nothing though. A book that becomes part of how you survived being a teenager has earned something, even if it’s not pure craft.

If you want your own copy to underline into oblivion, you can find it here.

We accept the love we think we deserve.

About Stephen Chbosky

Chbosky wrote Perks in his twenties, based partly on his own high school years outside Pittsburgh, and then more or less vanished into screenwriting and directing for a decade, including adapting and directing the 2012 film version himself, which is rare for a novelist and probably why the movie doesn’t butcher the book the way these things usually go. He’s since written the Hocus Pocus sequel screenplay and the novel Imaginary Friend, a horror doorstop that has almost nothing in common with Perks except length of gestation. The guy clearly sat on this story for years before it poured out of him, and it shows.

If This Wrecked You, Read These Next

Looking for Alaska by John Green, for the same mix tape melancholy and a group of kids who feel too smart and too sad for their own school. Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson, if you want the quieter, angrier cousin of Charlie’s trauma told by a narrator who refuses to write anyone a nice letter about it. It’s Kind of a Funny Story by Ned Vizzini, for teenage mental health handled with humor instead of quite so many tears. Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell, if the mix tape romance is what actually got you.

For your book club

1. Charlie is writing to an anonymous “friend” the whole book. Who do you think that friend really is, and does the answer change how you read his honesty?
2. Is Charlie a believable teenage boy, or is he really an adult’s idea of what a sensitive teenage boy sounds like?
3. The abuse reveal comes very late and very fast. Did it feel earned to you, or rushed?
4. Patrick and Sam both get less interior life than Charlie despite carrying huge stories of their own. Does that bother you, or is it the natural limit of a first-person narrator?
5. Would this book have hit you the same way if you’d read it for the first time as an adult instead of a teenager?